ANN PATCHETT Run ****(*)

I loved this book, and it made me think too.

It's about adoption, race, family, class and truth - which sounds heavy, but it's done with a very deft touch.

Two black brothers have been adopted as baby and toddler by a former Mayor of Boston and his wife (both white) and brought up in a privileged, cultured home in which they have thrived. But the wife (their adopted mother) has died.

The main story takes place over a couple of days when the boys are university students. Walking back from a Jesse Jackson lecture, to which they have been unwillingly dragged by their father, it's snowing very heavily and one of the boys is about to be hit by a car when a black woman pushes him out of the way and is badly injured.

The woman has an 11-year-old daughter who quickly reveals that she knows all about the boys and their home and family - she and her mother have been benignly stalking them for years. The woman is the boys' natural mother. The boys and their father have never noticed her because the black underclass are effectively invisible to them, even though they are politically liberal. The family let the girl stay with them while her mother is in hospital and soon grow to love her and to realise who the woman is.

You're taken very convincingly into the minds of each of the characters, who are drawn with great sympathy.

There are a few plot twists which keep you turning the pages, but it's the characters and the ideas which are so appealing.

Something I found fascinating was that I had to work really hard to picture the boys as black, but had no problem picturing the girl or her mother. That's part of the story, I suppose - they're white men in black skins.